Managing Multiple Vendors is Hard, but Local Businesses Need One Source of Truth

Local businesses have very diverse marketing priorities. They need a hearty blend of organic and paid marketing to just keep up with their competition, let alone to differentiate themselves. For starters, they require an SEO-optimized website, social media pages and ads and radio and TV ads. Then add retargeting, a customer relationship manager and email marketing—that’s where we see a glaring opportunity for agencies and media companies.

The demand is ever growing, but it isn’t always easy to meet. In order to suit local business’ needs, you’re forced to:

Shell out money to web developers to connect multiple apps to your platform. Of course, that never goes smoothly.

Bring it all in house and build an expensive business dashboard where your clients can access a variety of tools. Expensive is the operative word here.

Provide a list of separate sites that you expect clients to log in to. And then, it’s doubtful a small business is going to bookmark five different sites, remember all of their passwords and navigate them efficiently. They just won’t do it.

In other words, using several vendors and/or solutions is expensive, time-consuming and extremely stressful. Regardless of the challenges, local businesses want you to be that single point of contact—you have to be the master of all trades.

In truth, 70% of business owners want a single point of contact for all of their digital solutions (Vendasta), and agencies that provide an integrated platform are more attractive than those with standalone tools.